I'm retired. I just run my own system these days although there are still a few servers out there I have access to. I did at one time run a fairly small server farm but those days are long gone. I did that whole thing on Slackware and built all the bits.

Even on Mac systems I have had to fool with I just fire up a terminal and "fake it". The term I use for guessing till it works. I enjoy making up command strings that I think should work and trying them out. Also man and info work across the *nix world quite nicely.

Debian to me is almost cheating. I do love it and have a partition it lives on though.

A lots of tools are shared and there are certainly many commonalities but it seems... ignorant or lazy... to suggest all *nix are the same or even "basically" the same. There are certainly major differences in subsystems among distros. You want to know if you're using a distro that employs BSD-style or SysV-style init, or maybe not init at all but instead systemd (like Arch, SUSE,etc) or upstart (Ubuntu). You want to know that runlevel 5 on a RHEL box gives you a multiuser graphical environment but on Solaris will shut the system down.

slowriot wrote:A lots of tools are shared and there are certainly many commonalities but it seems... ignorant or lazy... to suggest all *nix are the same or even "basically" the same. There are certainly major differences in subsystems among distros. You want to know if you're using a distro that employs BSD-style or SysV-style init, or maybe not init at all but instead systemd (like Arch, SUSE,etc) or upstart (Ubuntu). You want to know that runlevel 5 on a RHEL box gives you a multiuser graphical environment but on Solaris will shut the system down.

Ummm ... OK. It's true SysV is dumb and BSD is the one true way and there are different ways to manage the varios OSs but all the same stuff is common across them all. I have trouble shot Sco systems I knew nothing about and got em' up and running and talking UDP to Sco so they could fix what was busted on it. Just standard *nix stuff, everything is a freaking file, you should know the drill. I have run FreeBSD just for fun although I never ran production servers on it.

Had I been raised up on the toy distros, Ubuntu etc I would have had no clue at all.

As you can see runlevels 0,1, and 6 are the same, but 2-5 are not. It's annoying when you want to go to runlevel 3 and find out you're in runlevel 2 and runlevel 3 is the same as runlevels 2,3,4, and 5. I could setup the runlevels, but I don't want to setup the runlevels. I want the distro to have already setup the runlevels for me, and if they're not going to do that, they might as well just use a BSD style init system, which really makes more sense anyway.

Red Hat's admin tools are much nicer, and they are installed by default. In Debian, I usually install sysv-rc-conf. Why this isn't installed by default, I'm not sure. Then there are the different system-config- tools Red Hat has created. They're just nice, and they make editing stuff, like Iptables, much easier.

The structure of apt if awful. How do you search? apt-get search? No, apt-cache search. This doesn't make sense. On a Red Hat box, I can do yum search <keyword>, which is much more discoverable with yum --help. If they wanted separate commands they should have apt-search, apt-install, apt-update, etc. This would mirror the pkg tools on FreeBSD, incidentally.

Then there is the scattered documentation. The Red Hat documentation is much more focused and succinct. Debian is scattered and comes off as haphazard.

Then there is the PITA that is running x86 stuff on a x64 Debian install. (They may have fixed this with multi-arch, but I haven't tried it yet.) On Red Hat stuff, I can just install the x86 packages I need. Debian has a package that contains everything that needs to be installed, and it's not easy to find the first time.

Debian just isn't my thing. I've spent years with Red Hat stuff, so yeah, there is a little bias due to familiarity. However, they've always had defaults that I've thought of as sane. I don't have to do a lot of work to get the system where I want it, and that means a lot. Red Hat has it's things that annoy me, but overall it annoys me less then Debian. Incidentally, I don't mind Ubuntu and Mint, since they have saner defaults then Debian proper. Although, they still have apt.

Odd, just wanted to pop in and clarify something that I'm not seeing in the conversation.

There are two very different "Linux Mint" distros.

The mainstream Linux Mint (14, 15 in beta) is a superset of Ubuntu. It's nice if you need UEFI installable media or other things that Ubuntu has, but don't want the standard Ubuntu desktop.

The other Linux Mint is LMDE, which is a semi-rolling distro based off of Debian Testing. It periodically snapshots Testing and makes that available as a Mint Update Pack. You can't easily move to the full rolling Testing without breaking a lot of the Mint-isms.

I'm running a Raring (Ubuntu 13.04) and Olivia (Linux Mint 15) mixture at the moment. Not recommended, but I like broken.

thegtproject wrote:I'm thinking I've misinterpreted this site as system enthusiasts, groups of people interested in these things, I imagined anyone in these forums would consider themselves power users- or at least an interest in that direction. That has been my mind set on sharing my thoughts, but for some reason I'm getting nothin' but aggro. I haven't blasted the other side as wrong, I've only stated reasons why I enjoy the side I am on. It's insight, not debate.

EDIT: I didn't mean this as condescending I was considering your comment on "everyone should learn how to compile from source" and thinking: Why WOULDN'T the people around here not want to learn that? It's fun for us geeks, right?

PenGun wrote: Had I been raised up on the toy distros, Ubuntu etc I would have had no clue at all.

Indeed. If someone really wants to learn Unix-like operating systems, I suggest FreeBSD. For the money, it gives one of the purest Unix experiences there is with out being excessively difficult to get a functioning OS, and the documentation is easy to follow along with.

The toy distros aren't bad. They're good examples of a fully functioning system, and they're great when a canned system is needed quickly. Plus, they tend to have commercial software support from third parties.

PenGun wrote:Also man and info work across the *nix world quite nicely.

Speaking of OS X, man pages, and the *nix world. Some of the manpages on OS X don't jive with the utilities installed. I'll should check again now that I have access to an OS X system again, but date --help and man date would show two different ways to set the date with date --help being the correct syntax.

Then there was the storage distro that didn't have any manpages. It was fun troubleshooting a live production system while hoping the options did what you thought they did. There was --help, but it's not as in-depth as manpages are.

Flatland_Spider wrote:Speaking of OS X, man pages, and the *nix world. Some of the manpages on OS X don't jive with the utilities installed. I'll should check again now that I have access to an OS X system again, but date --help and man date would show two different ways to set the date with date --help being the correct syntax.

thegtproject wrote:I'm thinking I've misinterpreted this site as system enthusiasts, groups of people interested in these things, I imagined anyone in these forums would consider themselves power users- or at least an interest in that direction. That has been my mind set on sharing my thoughts, but for some reason I'm getting nothin' but aggro. I haven't blasted the other side as wrong, I've only stated reasons why I enjoy the side I am on. It's insight, not debate.

EDIT: I didn't mean this as condescending I was considering your comment on "everyone should learn how to compile from source" and thinking: Why WOULDN'T the people around here not want to learn that? It's fun for us geeks, right?

Forge wrote:The other Linux Mint is LMDE, which is a semi-rolling distro based off of Debian Testing. It periodically snapshots Testing and makes that available as a Mint Update Pack. You can't easily move to the full rolling Testing without breaking a lot of the Mint-isms.

I tried LMDE and the thing I didn't like about it (and it's unavoidable because of how it's structured) is that there can be several months in between updates for most packages except for certain ones like web browsers. This is sub-optimal if one of them has a security hole, which is too bad because it's a good distro otherwise and I like the semi-rolling idea.

slowriot wrote:You want to know if you're using a distro that employs BSD-style or SysV-style init, or maybe not init at all but instead systemd (like Arch, SUSE,etc) .

Actually openSUSE can use either SysV or systemd.

I didn't say it couldn't, but to my knowledge systemd is the default now.

Well you can just go and look in /etc and see what broken system that particular mess runs. Systemd seems especially dumb after a quick look. Whoo hoo we can boot without shell scripts. I should probably learn more before offering an opinion but hey, it's Friday.

Time for a scotch. An Hindu heresy today, it's rather nice. 'Kuchh Nai' means 'nothing' in hindu I am told. Cheap too. Oh lord we used to get just plastered then do serious system stuff to running systems on a Friday evening. Somehow we always got away with it. The ghod of drunks and fools like *nix admins too.

As I said SysV is a dumb thing but I can use it if I have to. BSD is the one true way to manage initialization and set up the system. Slackware does both, just so all the dumb stuff works too.

Then there is the PITA that is running x86 stuff on a x64 Debian install. (They may have fixed this with multi-arch, but I haven't tried it yet.) On Red Hat stuff, I can just install the x86 packages I need. Debian has a package that contains everything that needs to be installed, and it's not easy to find the first time.

The structure of apt if awful. How do you search? apt-get search? No, apt-cache search. This doesn't make sense. On a Red Hat box, I can do yum search <keyword>, which is much more discoverable with yum --help. If they wanted separate commands they should have apt-search, apt-install, apt-update, etc. This would mirror the pkg tools on FreeBSD, incidentally.

First ya know Google will do just fine and probably better than the apt search function. There are all kinds of wild depositories out there it will miss and Google will find.

Second, and the Kuchh Nai may be helping here, that whole runlevel nonsense is a good example of SysV stupidity. Who cares. You need 1 to do serious stuff that require single user and a bunch of stuff turned off for safety as you change the SYSTEM. You need, there are other ways, 6 to reboot it, and 3 is just fine for everything else. Just because there are lots of numbers does not mean it's a good ides to use em' all. Multiuser is all you need for a 3 category. Summoning X from a terminal is the _right_ way to do it. Not only can you toast it with a key combo, you get the, what is it, 6 base terminals + X and can switch between them. Perfect for people with multiple personalities.

I'm not a fan of systemd neither. It's most apparent point is for boot speed by enabling much more parallelism in the booting process and by using compiled code vice shell scripts. That approach has done nothing but make it more complicated to troubleshoot boot/service failures and remove finer control from yourself. The trade offs made here do not make sense to me even for a desktop. I'd rather take 10 more seconds booting and use sysv

PenGun wrote: First ya know Google will do just fine and probably better than the apt search function. There are all kinds of wild depositories out there it will miss and Google will find.

I like pkgs.org. It's more focused on just searching repos, and it provides the information in a much clearer manner.

I think the system should be as self-contained as possible. If I have to look stuff up via Google, that's pretty broken. Like Red Hat's nfs config file is /etc/sysconfig/nfs

Apt-cache search won't search some third-party repos even if they are installed? Could you clarify what you mean?

Second, and the Kuchh Nai may be helping here, that whole runlevel nonsense is a good example of SysV stupidity. Who cares. You need 1 to do serious stuff that require single user and a bunch of stuff turned off for safety as you change the SYSTEM. You need, there are other ways, 6 to reboot it, and 3 is just fine for everything else. Just because there are lots of numbers does not mean it's a good ides to use em' all. Multiuser is all you need for a 3 category. Summoning X from a terminal is the _right_ way to do it. Not only can you toast it with a key combo, you get the, what is it, 6 base terminals + X and can switch between them. Perfect for people with multiple personalities.

Even if you're booting at init 5, you should still have access to the tty terminals. Provided they're not disabled, like in Solaris. The Fedora 18 laptop I'm typing this on, which boots in init 5, will switch to tty 2 with ctrl+alt+F2, then alt+F# after that, and I have tty 2-6 available to me. This has been a feature for as long as I can remember.

Yeah, sysv runlevels are silly. The BSD init system is much more sensible. Just shutdown the services you don't need and disable logins. It's just annoying when stuff doesn't work the way it's expected to, like dropping to init 3 when Xorg needs and update and finding out you were actually in init 2 rather then init 5, like you thought, and init 2-5 are exactly the same.

Most distros disable the ctrl+alt+backspace key combo, and it can be enabled from a GUI or editing X11 config files. F18 is different because of systemd, so I'm not going to post instructions that will confuse people.

It's really nice to be able to boot directly into a graphical environment sometimes. I like doing that on my laptops since most of the time I'm going to be working with GUI programs anyway.

thegtproject wrote:I'm not a fan of systemd neither. It's most apparent point is for boot speed by enabling much more parallelism in the booting process and by using compiled code vice shell scripts. That approach has done nothing but make it more complicated to troubleshoot boot/service failures and remove finer control from yourself. The trade offs made here do not make sense to me even for a desktop. I'd rather take 10 more seconds booting and use sysv

The point of systemd is to have one process to rule all other processes. It's like inetd for system processes and events.

Systemd makes more sense for a desktop/laptop then on a server. It's much easier to coordinate events, like ones that happen on a desktop/laptop, when there is one central process to check. Hot-plug events are one example of system events that have been problematic. Microsoft did something similar starting in Windows 7. They have one event handler that handles all the services, scheduling, etc.

PenGun wrote:Had I been raised up on the toy distros, Ubuntu etc I would have had no clue at all.

That's kind of silly, IMO. At the end of the day, Ubuntu is essentially a snapshot of Debian Testing (Ubuntu LTS releases) or Unstable (non-LTS releases) with a GUI and a few Canonical-specific features pre-installed. There's nothing preventing anyone from poking around under the hood, or even installing the Server flavor (which is pretty bare-bones) instead of the default version.

I started out dabbling with Redhat/Fedora, but the majority of my Linux experience to date has been on Ubuntu. Because of what I've learned from running Ubuntu, I'm now quite comfortable setting up Debian systems as well.

Edit:

Flatland_Spider wrote:I don't find the defaults in Debian to be sane, the documentation is awful, and I don't find it easier to administer.

I suppose I have to agree with you on the documentation. IMO that's Debian's biggest weak point.

Flatland_Spider wrote:The structure of apt if awful. How do you search? apt-get search? No, apt-cache search. This doesn't make sense. On a Red Hat box, I can do yum search <keyword>, which is much more discoverable with yum --help. If they wanted separate commands they should have apt-search, apt-install, apt-update, etc. This would mirror the pkg tools on FreeBSD, incidentally.

Seems rather nit-picky to me. One of the reasons I switched from Fedora to Ubuntu was that -- somewhat non-intuitive apt CLI syntax aside -- the package management tools actually *worked*. (I guess yum/rpm have gotten better in the past few years, but back around the time of Fedora 6 they were pretty darned awful.)

Flatland_Spider wrote:Then there is the PITA that is running x86 stuff on a x64 Debian install. (They may have fixed this with multi-arch, but I haven't tried it yet.) On Red Hat stuff, I can just install the x86 packages I need. Debian has a package that contains everything that needs to be installed, and it's not easy to find the first time.

And like anything else, once you've found it the first time it ceases to be an issue forever after. I added it to my checklist of things to do post-install on new systems... it takes all of 10 seconds to type "apt-get install ia32-libs"... end of problem.

PenGun wrote:Had I been raised up on the toy distros, Ubuntu etc I would have had no clue at all.

That's kind of silly, IMO. At the end of the day, Ubuntu is essentially a snapshot of Debian Testing (Ubuntu LTS releases) or Unstable (non-LTS releases) with a GUI and a few Canonical-specific features pre-installed. There's nothing preventing anyone from poking around under the hood, or even installing the Server flavor (which is pretty bare-bones) instead of the default version.

I started out dabbling with Redhat/Fedora, but the majority of my Linux experience to date has been on Ubuntu. Because of what I've learned from running Ubuntu, I'm now quite comfortable setting up Debian systems as well.

Did you even read what I said?

Ubuntu and Debian, who Cannonical ripped off for their distro are fine distributions for what they are. The dpkg and it's apt system are among the best package managers there are, probably why Cannonical boosted that distro.

None of this would have helped at all to get Mac, Sco and other *nix systems I have had to beat on to get them to do what I wanted them to do. It's really Slackware, which I have run for 17 years now, that gives me the chops to hack random *nix platforms. I have run it since 3.2 after I got really upset with NT 4.0, I liked 3.51.

Debian to me is a no brain system that basically sets it's self up and Ubuntu is it's stupid sister. Just saying.

just brew it! wrote:Seems rather nit-picky to me. One of the reasons I switched from Fedora to Ubuntu was that -- somewhat non-intuitive apt CLI syntax aside -- the package management tools actually *worked*. (I guess yum/rpm have gotten better in the past few years, but back around the time of Fedora 6 they were pretty darned awful.)

It is. I'm not going to dispute that.

I'm just doing my part to up hold the proud tradition of nit-picking that has brought us multiple standards, upteen Linux distros, and multiple tools that do the same thing except slightly differently.

End User wrote:xxxx:~ yyyy$ date --help....

Oh good, they fixed it.

PenGun wrote:"Apt-cache search won't search some third-party repos even if they are installed? Could you clarify what you mean?"

Well if you have the repos addy installed it's been found. Of course it will attempt to query that and build a set of tables if it's on the list.

That's what I thought, since that's how package managers work.

I still don't understand what the point of that comment was.

PenGun wrote:Debian to me is a no brain system that basically sets it's self up and Ubuntu is it's stupid sister. Just saying.

Some of us just have better things to do with our time then tweak on a system. Just sayin'. Not implying aaaannnnnyyyything at all. Just throwin' that out there. :|

Last edited by Flatland_Spider on Tue Apr 23, 2013 1:56 pm, edited 1 time in total.

PenGun wrote:Debian to me is a no brain system that basically sets it's self up

Why is that a bad thing, exactly?

Because if you didn't hammer the iron yourself, cursing and sweating, then it's not REAL and you can take no pride whatsoever! It's near-on useless, and a sign of weakness and frailty.

Also, some folks just plain don't like the easy way.

Actual, valid answers would involve some disclaimer of perfectly fine-tuning by hand to exacting specifications, but the days of bespoke distros are passing, and if you're really set on going it alone, there are still variants of Gentoo and Arch that cater to that mindset, and there will always be LFS.

Forge wrote:Actual, valid answers would involve some disclaimer of perfectly fine-tuning by hand to exacting specifications, but the days of bespoke distros are passing, and if you're really set on going it alone, there are still variants of Gentoo and Arch that cater to that mindset, and there will always be LFS.

qft LFS is one of the most fun things I've ever done with Linux. For those interested: http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/ (Linux From Scratch (LFS) is a project that provides you with step-by-step instructions for building your own custom Linux system, entirely from source code)